Attending Unaccredited Internships

In accordance with American Psychological Association’s Standards on Accreditation, the SOPP must ensure the quality of internship training experiences for its students. For students who attend APA or CPA accredited internship sites, the adequacy and quality of the training experiences are monitored by the accrediting body and the SOPP requires no further documentation beyond the minimum (e.g., mid and end point evaluations and letter of completion). For students who attend unaccredited internships, specific information outlined below must be provided to document the adequacy and quality of the training experiences.

Information required to document includes:

the nature and appropriateness of the training activities;

frequency and quality of supervision;

credentials of the supervisors;

how the internship evaluates student performance;

how interns demonstrate competency at the appropriate level;

The student is required to submit the internship’s training manual to the Office of Clinical Training (OCT) within 30 days of starting the internship. In addition, the student must complete and submit to OCT the Unaccredited Doctoral Internship Training and Tracking Form by October 15th of their internship year. Furthermore, the OCT will keep copies of the student’s mid- and end-point evaluations and completion letter in the student’s clinical training file in accordance with the SOPP’s record retention policy. If the site does not provide copies of these documents, the student is responsible for submitting them to OCT. Also, the student is required to submit mid- and end-point evaluations of their primary supervision. If the site does not have their own process/forms for supervision evaluation, the student should use the SOPP supervision evaluation protocol.